Reply by MrsN

In college I cut 1/16” off my index finger with a table saw. It was a production class so we were “mass producing” Jenga knock off games in a wooden box (the wooden block stacking game) I was ripping stock to size, about 5”, and had a pile of pieces that I was cutting. One of the pieces had a rough edge with a taper that I didn’t notice so I ran it though skinny end first. As the board made it to the thicker end it wedged itself between the blade and the blade guard and got stuck. In a moment of not thinking I decided that I could pull the guard up a bit to un-stick my part and keep cutting, so I take my left hand and flick the guard and keep cutting. I grab my part to see if I burned it at all while it got stuck and noticed this red spot on the board then look at my hand and realize I got my finger. I walked calmly to the lab assistant and said “we have a problem” then went to the sink to wash off my hand. My college professor helped me get it cleaned up a bit and I held pressure on it while we talked to campus police to file the accident report, then he cleaned the blood drops off of my shoe. The cop took me to the urgent care to get looked at. My roommate freaked out when I called to tell her I would need a ride home from the hospital because I cut my finger, she actually beat me to the hospital and had hospital security looking for me. When I called my mom to tell her she said “I bet you wish you had that math minor”, my dad said “are you ok” followed by “how could you be so stupid. I was also taking a class called lab and classroom management at the time, we spent the rest of the week talking about how we can keep our students from doing things like it. Now I tell my students about it and tell them that just because they know the safety rules, or can recite all of the rules, or have done it before, shit still can happen. it takes about 1/2 a second of not thinking for something bad to happen.